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Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

The opening shots of Peeping Tom guide us through the dim streets of a red light district, and the unseen protagonist focusing on their prey. Prey, because although we are yet to see the deadly encounter take place, the crosshairs of the camera's viewfinder frame the prostitute with a certain finality. And as the murder takes place, the movie cuts from its screaming victim not to a menacing reaction shot, but a projector silently whirring and replaying the crime. What Powell has done is implicate the viewer immediately, and point to the power of cinema to seduce us into the complicity of a murderer's gaze. We don't see the perpetrator's face until the next morning, and it isn't what we expect - blonde, handsome, with those shockingly blue eyes that flickered the film into life. The next hour is spent acquainting us with Mark Lewis, portrayed in a curious performance by German actor Carl Boehm, who uses his boyish looks, shy glances and accented syllables to momentarily disarm our suspicions.The director is Michael Powell, who is remembered most prominently for his collaborations with Emeric Pressburger through their production company The Archers, giving us several striking Technicolor masterpieces such as A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus, and The Red Shoes. Peeping Tom, shot in Eastmancolor, takes this visual style to lurid heights, with the set design and costume painted in various garish hues, and cinematographer Otto Heller throwing lights on every surface to give the image a glittery sheen that verges on the unnatural and off-putting. Its extravagance is ironic, as seen when a well-dressed gentleman looks around the pristine store warily, eyes Mark's pin-up shots, and then, flustered, declares to buy the whole lot. Lorraine's 'blemish', which now more than ever resembles a poorly made prosthetic, fits snugly into this premise: even the disfigured prostitutes and their woes are fraudulent. The shy, blonde, blue- eyed focus puller has the most reason and motivation. We learn of his upbringing at the hands of a cruel scientist and also father, who put his entire childhood under constant surveillance, prodding and poking his boy like a wounded animal. Mark has inherited this aggression into his own filmmaking, clutching his camera close like a newborn, and his mental scars compel an obsession to recapture the same fear he experienced. He obliterates privacy and comfort, and as his victims slowly sense his intent, the score, a mournful piano, lurches into a frenzy. Brian Easdale times his compositions to reflect the tenuous temperament of Mark. As he displays his collection of home videos to Helen, the tempo rises and falls, as if the music is as confused as Mark is, struggling to come to terms with the fact that one of his chosen victims, who he has cornered into his hellishly lit projection room, might actually care for him. Critics reviled the film on release, declaring it nauseating, sick and filthy. It was an unfortunate example of the press taking the moral high ground, and down Peeping Tom went, along with Powell's career. The case is especially puzzling considering the fervour that Psycho caused not 12 months beforehand, the former being the much bloodier film. Critics were offended at being thrust into the sympathies of Mark Lewis, and having their gazes aligned with a murderer, but how many of them held their breaths as Marion Crane made her getaway, and how many switched their allegiance over to Norman Bates after her swift exit, quietly willing the car into the swamp? Moral hypocrisies aside, Mark's vague, Freudian backstory doesn't afford him a whole lot of sympathy. Powell takes it too far, too seriously - he even plays Mark's father, as an example, and all that's left for him to do is burst through the screen and scold the audience. Compare this to the slow but sure seduction of Rear Window, where even Grace Kelly could not wrest us from our suspicions. Although it shocked in the 60s, today Mark's self-inflicted demise seems more funny than tragic; dark, kitschy melodrama, and all the more disconcerting if you're coming from the Archer's romantic films. And yet, does this work in favour of the film? How unsettled would Powell be at the sight of today's cinema, where blood, gore and popcorn flow more freely than even in Mark's wildest dreams? Movies are more graphic than ever, but audiences are unmoved, and in their gaping stare, they may perhaps not even realise the mirror being pointed at them, or register the blade pricking at their skin.

For the true horror movie fanatic, there are certain movies that are required viewing as they had such an impact on the horror landscape that one cannot truly understand the history of the genre without experiencing those films. PEEPING TOM is most certainly in that category. The year 1960 was a pivotal moment in horror's evolution as the releases of this movie, along with PSYCHO and BLACK Sunday, had a profound mark on horror and clearly delineate the change from the old "monster movie" to modern horror.A museum piece does not a entertaining view make, though, and there are many movies that film historians will tell you are landmark films, but may not entertain a modern audience any longer. So, the question is when we put the opinions of the film snobs aside and the importance of this movie, is it actually a good movie? I am happy to say that it is, but in truth I didn't appreciate enough on my first view, but after seeing it again after a few years, I truly enjoyed the movie.This movie is not going to deliver a lot of kill scenes, gore, or "scares". It's just not that sort of horror. It's often called the British PSYCHO, though I don't feel it's fair to consistently compare the movies. PSYCHO is, in some ways, a much more deliberate horror movie, while this film is understated. Yes, we get some murders, done in fabulous style (a style that Mario Bava almost certainly imitated in later films), but most of the movie is what a film critic might call a "character study". The movie's depth and interest comes from the main character, Mark's, background, his history and the actor's's devotion to implementing a rich emotional feel to the character, making him a sympathetic, damaged person, more than a "monster" or "psycho".Clearly, a large part of the theme of this movie is voyeurism, which plays out in many ways. We learn of Mark's father, a scientist who used Mark in his experiments on fear, documenting his life in sight and sound in an ultimate voyeurism. Mark work in his, in his off time, making girlie photos that are sold in the news stand. Of course, Mark's obsession with his camera, and the way that he films his murders works as a double expression of voyeurism. Mark, of course, is a voyeur, watching his work over and over through the safety of his lens, but we, the audience, as also made to be voyeurs through the POV camera angles that are used throughout the movie. This is, perhaps, why audiences were so revolted by this movie, which has no more violence or sex that anything Hammer was doing at the time, but it's that finger pointing at the audience, making us feel "dirty" for watching these crimes from our point of view that may have turned so many away.The movie is gorgeous to watch. The rich, saturated technicolor gives it a vibrant look that is no longer seen in movies and, I for one, appreciate it greatly. It makes the movie feel as if it's in another world, like the document of a deviant from Oz. I've been exposed to plenty of classics that bored me to death, but this is one horror classic that is well worth the time.

This is one perplexing film, almost as odd as Anna Massey's, the heroine's, face. Her features -- eyes, nose, lips, chin, neck -- seem to have been plucked at random from some genetic hat and flung together by the creator and, happily, came out right, almost by accident. Half the time I couldn't tell whether a scene was aimless or held some deeper, clinical significance that was lost on a dullard like me.The bare bones of the story are plain enough. Handsome, introverted, young Karlheinz Böhm works as some kind of focus puller in the British movie industry. He occupies the top floor of a rooming house and the largest room is dark and filled with mysterious cinematographic junk, like one of those chambers in a horror movie.Due do his child abuse, he loves to see women being frightened and then he kills them with a sharp spike on the end of one of the feet of his tripod, filming their faces all the time. He doesn't do it very often but when he does, she switches his persona from his usual reticent, shambling self, to a cockeyed maniac.Is there hope for him? I mean, we really DO want him to get caught or at least stop committing these little sins because he's pathetic. He sounds like Peter Lorre. For a few moment, in the middle of the film, yes, there seems to be a way out of his obsession. Anna Massey, a winsome young lady of twenty one, talks him into a date and more or less forces him to leave his movie camera and tripod behind. He's surprised to find he's enjoyed himself and promises himself never to kill her -- unless he sees her frightened.As the lunatic, Böhm is bland. Anna Massey is far more interesting. When she speaks, it seems that only her lips are moving while the rest of her face remains at rest. (That really IS worth making a movie about.) Moira Shearer has a small role as one of the first victims. She's given some clunky choreography except that she gets to bust one or two ballet moves that I think are called kick fans. She's quite a dancer. She's the only woman I've ever seen who can be en pointe sitting down.Nobody else is of much importance except Massey's blind mother, Maxine Audley, who makes up for the challenge to her sight by being practically clairvoyant. The police are no more than drones.It's not hard to understand why Böhm is more comfortable with cameras than with people. Conversing with other people is an extremely complicated business. It's only because we do it so often that it seems routine. But it's not. We have to manage our body language, our facial expressions, our utterances, our inflections, and the distance we keep between ourselves and the other. We don't notice these commonplace decisions except in people who make the wrong ones, as schizophrenics do.But those careful and precise judgments don't need to be made when a camera or a computer or radio can act as a transducer, shielding us from the judgment of others. We're safe behind that baffle. You doubt? Ever have stage fright? Well extreme introverts like Böhm have people fright.But, in the end, I don't know what to make of this movie. It's a mistake to read too much into a thing. It's like looking at a random assortment of stars in the sky and connecting them in such a way that you wind up with the outline of a bull or, for the Chinese, a rat. The prominent director may have led some viewers to make that error, but I'll have it some points for its meanderings being the result of deliberation; for the rest, felix culpa.

This film is not a thriller but more of an experience in which you put the pot of water on the stove but remove it before it begins to boil furiously; a slow-burner, if you will. What really matters is the aura that cloaks the male protagonist Mark. There is something fragile about him, something *vulnerable* that Vivian--the daughter of the couple renting the bottom floor of Mark's house--immediately notices and attempts to reach out to him. The viewer already knows that Mark is dangerous, but despite the psychopathy he has demonstrated in the precision of his killings, despite the perverseness of him filming it while it happens, and despite him developing said film so he can relive the moments over and over in the comfort of his makeshift studio, you pray that not only will Vivian be able to slip from his fingers unharmed as she unwittingly treads closer and closer to finding out his secret, but that her desire to know him better and to smooth out the kinks in his demeanor (the visible ones, anyway) makes for a surprisingly endearing couple.As the title of this review should tell you, it reminds me a lot of Francis Dolarhyde's relationship with Reba in Manhunter (much more pronounced and tragic in the Red Dragon version), in which the killer finds temporary solace in an unlikely 'Morality Pet', which, despite her attempts to help their secret killers, are in the end unable to do so, and to me they serve as reminders to the viewer that compassion and empathy are indeed imperative in the handling and treatment of the mentally ill or disturbed, but they alone cannot solve the psychosis (as Vivian's intuitive mother hinted to Mark near the end of the film).I would recommend watching this for those who are curious about the psychological horror genre but are intimidated by David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick's works.